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Saturday, March 20th, 2010
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Facts about North Korea

Facts about North Korea

Facts about North Korea

North Korea - The Craziest Country in the World
Via: Online Schools

North Korea, officially the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK), is a state in East Asia, occupying the northern half of the Korean Peninsula. Its capital and largest city is Pyongyang. The Korean Demilitarized Zone serves as the buffer area between North Korea and South Korea. The Amnok River and the Tumen River form the border between North Korea and People’s Republic of China. A section of the Tumen River in the extreme north-east is the border with Russia.

The peninsula was governed by the Korean Empire until it was annexed by Japan following the Russo-Japanese War of 1905. It was divided into Soviet and American occupied zones in 1945, following the end of World War II. North Korea refused to participate in a United Nations–supervised election held in the south in 1948, which led to the creation of separate Korean governments for the two occupation zones. Both North and South Korea claimed sovereignty over the peninsula as a whole, which led to the Korean War of 1950. A 1953 armistice ended the fighting; however, the two countries are officially still at war with each other, as a peace treaty was never signed.Both states were accepted into the United Nations in 1991. On May 26, 2009, North Korea unilaterally withdrew from the armistice.

North Korea is a single-party state under a united front led by the Korean Workers’ Party. The country’s government follows the Juche ideology of self-reliance, developed by the country’s late Eternal President Kim Il-sung. Juche became the official state ideology when the country adopted a new constitution in 1972, though Kim Il-sung had been using it to form policy since at least as early as 1955. Officially a socialist republic, North Korea is considered by many in the outside world to be a totalitarian Stalinist dictatorship. The current secretary of the KWP Central Committee Secretariat and leader of the armed forces is Kim Jong-il, son of Kim Il-sung.

In the aftermath of the Japanese occupation of Korea which ended with Japan’s defeat in World War II in 1945, Korea was divided at the 38th parallel in accordance with a United Nations arrangement, to be administered by the Soviet Union in the north and the United States in the south. The history of North Korea formally begins with the establishment of the democratic People’s Republic in 1948.

Division of Korea

In August 1945, the Soviet Army established a Soviet Civil Authority to rule the country until a domestic regime, friendly to the USSR, could be established. After the Soviet forces’ departure in 1948, the main agenda in the following years was unification of Korea from both sides until the consolidation of Syngman Rhee regime in the South with American military support and the suppression of the October 1948 insurrection ended hopes that the country could be reunified by way of Communist revolution in the South. In 1949, a military intervention into South Korea was considered by the Northern regime but failed to receive support from the Soviet Union, which had played a key role in the establishment of the country.

The withdrawal of most United States forces from the South in June dramatically weakened the Southern regime and encouraged Kim Il-sung to re-think an invasion plan against the South. The idea itself was first rejected by Joseph Stalin but with the development of Soviet nuclear weapons, Mao Zedong’s victory in China and the Chinese indication that it would send troops and other support to North Korea, Stalin approved an invasion which led to the Korean War.

The Korean War was a civil war between North Korea and South Korea with major hostilities beginning on June 25, 1950, pausing with an armistice signed on July 27, 1953. The conflict arose from the division on Korea by the UN and the attempts of the two Korean powers to re-unify Korea under their respective governments. The division led to full scale civil war with a cost of more than 2 million civilians and soldiers from both sides. The period immediately before the war was marked by escalating border conflicts at the 38th parallel and attempts to negotiate elections for the entirety of Korea.

These negotiations ended when the military of North Korea invaded the South on June 25, 1950. Under the aegis of the United Nations, nations allied with the United States intervened on behalf of South Korea. After rapid advances in a South Korean counterattack, North-allied Chinese forces intervened on behalf of North Korea, shifting the balance of the war and ultimately leading to an armistice that approximately restored the original boundaries between North and South Korea.

While some have referred to the conflict as a civil war, there were many other factors at play. The Korean War was also the first armed confrontation of the Cold War and set the standard for many later conflicts. It created the idea of a proxy war, where the two superpowers would fight in another country, forcing the people in that nation to suffer the bulk of the destruction and death involved in a war between such large nations. The superpowers avoided descending into an all-out war with one another, as well as the mutual use of nuclear weapons. It also expanded the Cold War, which to that point had mostly been concerned with Europe. A heavily guarded demilitarized zone on the 38th parallel continues to divide the peninsula today with anti-Communist and anti-North Korea sentiment still remaining in South Korea.

Since the ceasefire of the Korean War in 1953 the relations between the North Korean government and South Korea, the European Union, Canada, the United States, and Japan have remained tense. Fighting was halted in the ceasefire, but both Koreas are still technically at war. Both North and South Korea signed the June 15th North-South Joint Declaration in 2000, in which both sides made promises to seek out a peaceful reunification. Additionally, on October 4, 2007, the leaders of North and South Korea pledged to hold summit talks to officially declare the war over and reaffirmed the principle of mutual non-aggression.

Late 20th century

North and South Korea have never signed a formal peace treaty and thus are still officially at war; only a ceasefire was declared. South Korea’s government came to be dominated by its military and a relative peace was punctuated by border skirmishes and assassination attempts. The North failed in several assassination attempts on South Korean leaders, most notably in 1968, 1974 and the Rangoon bombing in 1983; tunnels were frequently found under the DMZ and war nearly broke out over the axe murder incident at Panmunjeom in 1976. In 1973, extremely secret, high-level contacts began to be conducted through the offices of the Red Cross, but ended after the Panmunjeom incident with little progress having been made and the idea that the two Koreas would join international organisations separately.

In the late 1990s, with the South having transitioned to democracy, the success of the Nordpolitik policy, and power in the North having been taken up by Kim Il-sung’s son Kim Jong-il, the two nations began to engage publicly for the first time, with the South declaring its Sunshine Policy.

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